Granted, someone else might have had the guts, gumption, and ignorance of the globe to set out to do what Columbus did, but he did it when no one before him had attempted and changed the world for it, better or worse.

Hippocrates of Kos, as he is better known in medical circles, was an ancient Greek physician who’s widely considered to be the father of Western medicine and the one who established medicine as a profession. He was the founder of the famous Hippocratic School of Medicine that helped to revolutionize medicine in the ancient world. Hippocrates laid the foundation for modern medicine with his methods and teachings (ground-breaking and radical for his time), while his immense influence can be traced to the oath that every doctor, nurse, and physician’s assistant has been taking for many years all over the Western World, the Hippocratic Oath. Some historians believe that the oath was written by Hippocrates himself or one of his students.

Sir Isaac Newton has surpassed Albert Einstein as the most influential physicist of all time outranking him by one place. The great English scientist is globally considered the key figure in the Scientific Revolution and his revolutionary scientific discoveries influenced many other great scientists including Einstein. Most experts and historians agree that his book Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy laid the foundation for classical mechanics and he also shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for inventing calculus.

His contributions to geometry revolutionized the subject and his methods influenced every mathematician and inventor who followed including Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, and Leibniz. He combined a genius for mathematics with insights into the nature of the physical universe, a mix that produced the foundations of hydrostatics, statics, and the explanation of the principle of the lever as well as many innovative machines, including siege engines and the screw pump that is named after him.

Leonardo da Vinci’s name is equated with genius and the cultural movement of the Renaissance, from where he got the nickname “Renaissance Man.” However, it’s really hard to define da Vinci’s actual profession since he mastered way too many things during his lifetime from sculpture to painting, architecture to music, mathematics to anatomy, and engineering among others. He was without a doubt the most diversely talented man of his time and many historians believe that a mind and personality like his comes only once every thousand years. Because of the multiple interests that spurred him to pursue various fields of knowledge, da Vinci is widely considered the archetype of the term genius and the greatest inventor who ever lived.